Not Enough People Lining Up For Entitlement Programs?

That's an easy fix. Bring the poor back to their senses by offering them even more money to do what everyone else does for free.

June 19, 2007 -- "Poor kids and their parents will pocket cash rewards - from $25 for good school attendance to $200 for visiting the doctor to $3,000 for passing five Regents exams - under an innovative anti-poverty program unveiled by city officials yesterday.

The "conditional cash transfer" program, modeled on plans in places like Mexico and Brazil, is privately funded but administered by the city.

Mayor Bloomberg has said the program "gives New Yorkers in poverty a financial incentive to look ahead and make decisions that will improve their prospects for the future."

About 14,000 participants will take part in the two-year $53 million pilot program beginning this fall.

As many as 5,100 families of three living below the poverty line in six low-earning neighborhoods, with at least one kid in fourth, seventh or ninth grade in a public school, would participate in the educational part of the program.

Half of the families (the rest will serve as a control group to measure results) will get paid as much as $5,000 a year for meeting various clean-living goals.

Among those families, teenagers will get paid directly $50 for taking the PSAT (a warm-up for the SAT, the most widely used college entrance exam), $300 for getting 11 high school credits a year and $50 for getting a library card - and a whopping $600 for every Regents exam passed, up to a maximum of five.

That means some teens could be directly paid as much as $3,000 by the city. Five Regents are needed to graduate high school.

The logic behind the move is that "in the adolescent years, it's the adolescent behavior that needs to be incentivized as much as the parents' behavior," said Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, who's overseeing the program."

INCENTIVIZED. Gotta hand it to the liberals. Who else could lie with a straight face. To them, it is logical to bribe people into being decent human beings. To train them that being an upstanding citizen means you get paid for it. Only the slovenly slothful beggars need apply. Those amenable to BULLSHITIVIZATION.